The iPhone 13 Pro may not be the best iPhone money can buy, but it’s a top choice for many.
The iPhone 13 Pro isn’t Apple’s top-end handset right now, but it offers a fantastic all-round experience, with some of the best battery life we’ve ever seen in an iPhone, and some of the best performance we’ve ever seen on any phone full stop, which, along with a smattering of small upgrades, makes it an altogether exemplary smartphone. The iPhone 13 Pro Max may be the option for anyone looking for the best of the best from Apple, but a lot of what makes that smartphone great is also available here, for a slightly cheaper price of $999 / £949 / AU$1,699. If you already have an iPhone, it’s likely the iPhone 13 Pro will be a big upgrade – unless you currently own last year’s iPhone 12 Pro or Pro Max – with improvements to almost every feature. One exception is the design, which remains similar to that of the iPhone 12 Pro. There’s a matte finish on the rear of the phone and stainless steel edges, which make the handset feel appropriately premium. The new A15 Bionic chipset paired with 6GB of RAM delivered more than enough power to run even the most demanding apps you’ll find in the Apple App Store, while the phone starts at 128GB of storage, with options up to 1TB for those who need lots of space. The iPhone 13 Pro also offers a fantastic camera experience, with a versatile array of cameras that can handle both daytime and night shooting with ease. The telephoto and macro cameras mean you can shoot at a variety of distances, too. Battery life is one of the biggest upgrades, and we found that the iPhone 13 Pro was capable of lasting a full day, no matter what we threw at it. It won’t last quite as long as the iPhone 13 Pro Max, but it will last longer than any iPhone you’ve used before. So the iPhone 13 Pro is a remarkably good smartphone – but so are all the iPhone 13 handsets, and if your budget won’t quite stretch to the Pro, the ‘standard’ iPhone 13 misses out on only a few of its specs and features, so you may find the cheaper handset suits you just fine. But if your head has been turned by everything the iPhone 13 Pro offers – the 120Hz screen, improved cameras and a touch more RAM or storage – then it may well be the perfect phone for you, especially if you don’t want or need the larger screen size of the iPhone 13 Pro Max. The iPhone 13 Pro was revealed on September 14, and you can buy the handset now from Apple, as well as from a variety of retailers and carriers. The iPhone 13 Pro release date was September 24,2021. The price starts at $999 / £949 / AU$1,699, which gets you 128GB of storage. If you need more storage you can choose from a 256GB model at $1,099 / £1,049 / AU$1,869, a 512GB model at $1,299 / £1,249 / AU$2,219, or the 1TB variant at $1,499 / £1,449 / AU$2,569. This is the first time we’ve seen a 1TB iPhone, and that price is correspondingly high. If you want a slightly higher-specced phone with a larger screen and battery, there’s also the iPhone 13 Pro Max, which starts at $1,099 / £1,049 / AU$1,849. The iPhone 13 Pro is the company’s most premium device yet that doesn’t include a Max in the title, and unlike the iPhone 13 Pro Max this is a more realistic size for one-handed use. If you’re looking for a new, mid-sized iPhone, this handset, or the iPhone 13, should suit you perfectly. Apple’s design has been refined from the iPhone 12 Pro, but the differences are minimal. It comes with stainless steel edges, a matte finish on the rear and Apple’s Ceramic Shield glass on both the front and back. Apple says that protection makes it four times less likely to break when dropped, compared to an iPhone without it. We wouldn’t recommend dropping your phone to find out if that’s true, obviously, but it should give you an extra bit of a piece of mind if your phone does take a tumble. The matte finish on the rear feels distinctly premium, especially when compared to the normal glass on the iPhone 13. In our time with the iPhone 13 Pro we’ve found the design to feel good in the hand; it has a touch more heft than the iPhone 13, which helps it sit in our hand comfortably. The iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 are almost identical in size, but you can’t switch cases between the two as they have a slightly different rear camera housing. The rear array on the iPhone 13 Pro does protrude from the body quite a bit, which may be an issue for some – it’s especially noticeable when you lay the phone down on a surface, so if you want to type on the screen when the phone is laying down, expect a touch of back and forth. The right-hand edge of the handset houses the power button, while the left-hand side is home to the mute slider, volume buttons and SIM tray. On the bottom edge of the handset are the speakers, and a Lightning port for charging. The phone is available in Graphite, Silver, Sierra Blue or Gold – the color pictured throughout this review. The Sierra Blue option is new this year, and it’s one of the most striking new colors we’ve seen from Apple in a while’. This is a good choice if you want a Pro phone that stands out. Like the iPhone 13, the iPhone 13 Pro comes with a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display. This screen doesn’t feature the best pixels-per-inch rating of the entire iPhone 13 range – for that, look at the iPhone 13 mini – but it does feature 460ppi, and the image quality is correspondingly crisp.
